IPA Best Practices, Design Techniques, tips and tricks, from the field and from inside the vendor, relating to the Interaction Process Automation product from ININ / I3 / Interactive Intelligence, Inc.
Author is Rick McGlinchey, an I3 employee from '97 to '08, who now works as a Process Architect and Consultant for Hire.

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Saturday, February 23, 2013

I had a chance to sit down recently for a little Q&A withININ's Geoff Calhoun. Geoff is the Product Manager for IPA and Interaction Content Manager (ICM) at Interactive Intelligence.

Now keep in mind I'm no journalist and I'm biased as hell when it comes to ININ and IPA in particular. Some of the questions are blatant setups and I won't apologize for that. Enjoy.

Q: So Geoff, How did you first come to know about ININ?

Calhoun: About six years ago at the previous company where I worked we were
looking to replace our PBX system. We brought in CIC just for dialer at
first and then when we got a demo. After that we decided to deploy CIC
2.4 to the whole enterprise.
J

Q: What drew you to the company and the product manager position?

Calhoun: I love the innovative atmosphere and all of the
nice people at Interactive. I have thought about working for
Interactive for years now. Having been in application development and
support for a long time, I wanted to get out in front
of the development processes, to get to guide where a product went in
the Market.

Q: Anything about your background you'd like to share?

Calhoun: I have been in IT for almost 15 years. I actually started at my last
job as data entry clerk and after 14 years was the director of
development and reporting. Went through all areas of IT from desktop
and server support, to infrastructure installation and
maintenance, and then on to database and application development.

Calhoun: All of the above and more. My overall vision is
to create a BPA product that everyone wants in their companies. IPA
needs to continue to evolve its ability to bridge the gap between the
ability to have complex integrations and being
simple enough for a Business Analyst to develop process flows. As to
the specifics, well I am still working on that part.

Q: It's great to have someone helping drive the product who has used it as a customer. Is it a fair statement that every ININ customer could benefit from IPA in some way?

Calhoun: Absolutely. EVERY company has processes that
can be automated. From simple time sheet processes all the way up to
something like a complex order management process.

Q: Where should customers start with IPA for their best chances at success?

Calhoun: Start with a small process. Not because IPA is a
complex product or hard to use, but because process optimization is
very complicated and most companies don’t have subject matter experts in
that area. Don’t be afraid to bring a consultant
if needed. Be sure to do an as-is process map along with your to-be
process map. You will learn an enormous amount of useful information
and probably be very surprised with what you find.

Q: Any new IPA features you can share that are particularly exciting to you?

Calhoun: We are working on a web client for IPA that will
be fantastic for users who don’t need our full features .Net client.
Also, we are working diligently on getting IPA into our cloud environment so that those customers can take advantage
of all that IPA has to offer.

Q: Any plans to engage customers/developers of IPA outside of the Interactions Conferences?

Calhoun: Absolutely. I will be reaching out to many of
our customers to understand how they are using IPA and how it can be
improved. Also, I will be hosting events for developers to help them
share their best practices and learnings related
to IPA.

Thanks to Geoff Calhoun of ININ for being a good sport and spilling the beans on IPA! He and I will be co-presenting an IPA Best Practices session called "Looking to automate business processes? Start here!" at ININ's upcoming Interactions 2013 in May in good old Indianapolis, IN, USA!